


cavalry//martyr

by aperfectsong



Series: backbone [4]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 18:39:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7185515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperfectsong/pseuds/aperfectsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Logan learns what it's like to be both the cavalry and the martyr. Set immediately after M.A.D. Logan POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cavalry//martyr

As he sat in the car outside Veronica’s apartment, Logan drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, trying to think of what to say.

  
But then, at her front door, when she told him, everything else seemed to dim, except horror, except disbelief, except that sudden realization of exactly how much she didn’t trust him.

  
Now, after their conversation outside her front door, Logan’s body is listless as he sits next to it. The porch light is on. The glass panes still hold the condensation that formed when she cracked the door open and the air conditioning met the outside humidity. It doesn’t surprise him that the door is locked now, only that her words are still out here with him:

  
_Even if it was you._

  
Just two days ago, they were wrapped around each other against the bathroom sink, dizzy from a lack of air, from finding each other again, dizzy with the anticipation that comes only with new beginnings. For everything that’s changed about her since they were friends, she still smelled the same: sweet and vaguely floral, like deodorant or shampoo. It seems like another world, now. A memory from someone else’s life.

  
Though he’s outside and the ocean isn’t too far off, her apartment complex feels oppressive – too many people living on top of and next to each other. Wet bathing suits drip from some of the railings and shoes lay next to closed doors. He can hear the muffled volume of a TV turned too loud, a baby crying, and someone yelling. The air smells like cigarettes and laundry and chlorine and someone’s late-night pizza dinner. At his own house, he can sometimes go hours without seeing another person; everything is quiet, clean, where it should be.

  
Dogs bark in the distance and Logan tries to think of what he could have said to convince Veronica to trust him, to let him be there for her the way he should have this whole year, but all he can think of is this:

  
her hair in January—too short, too uneven, to be a fashion statement;

  
the abrupt change that came with it—her clothes and boots and attitude;

  
her sleeping through English while he aimed spitballs at the back of her head to see her shudder as she woke up;

  
that day on the beach, gripping the tire iron so hard he gave himself blisters;

  
the three red lights he ran to get to the Camelot when he realized she wasn’t invincible—when he thought he could lose her, too—when he didn’t know what it all meant until she kissed him;

  
how everything means something different now.

  
_Even if it was you._

  
“Fuck,” he says, but it sounds too small. He’s not drunk enough for this new memory of Veronica in her white robe with her red eyes, saying all that stuff while he couldn’t catch up, while he struggled to remember which party was Shelley’s.   
Can Lilly see them now wherever she is?

  
He knocks but Veronica doesn’t answer. So he takes out his phone and types, “I swear I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” He stares at his phone for a long time, but she doesn’t reply. Her phone could be off, even. He waits. “Please just talk to me,” he sends.

  
His memory of the night of Shelley’s party is drunk-fuzzy and sensory: ocean-side in his car with the seats down, some freshmen beneath him—sand on his knees, a breeze through the open windows that tasted like sea salt, his headlights making diamonds on the water, her hair tangled around his fingers, her nails carving valleys on his back, the way Lilly’s used to.

  
It was a few months after Lilly died, back when he still couldn’t sleep without dreaming of her dying, without dreaming of time machines and the ways he could have saved her, back when he would lose track of entire days because they had all become so endless, without anything to anchor him. He thought the drugs would help him forget, like he thought the alcohol would. He didn’t end up taking them, but he sure as hell didn’t use them on Veronica.

 

And then he remembers the salt lick as though it were an out of body experience.

 

Veronica on that pool lounger, glossy-eyed, his mouth on her neck, warm with salt and tequila and beneath it some perfume, vaguely floral, while her dress rides up her thighs. Was it his hand that pushed up the white fabric? All they had to do was whisper and she would do what they said or go limp so they could put her the way they wanted. Does it matter, now, if she was drunk or dosed? Did any of them even check if she was still breathing?

  
_Even if it was you._

  
“Fuck,” Logan says again.

  
He gets into his car. He follows the PCH for a long time, counting mile signs. The thing about driving that always gets him is how easily you can fuck it up: turn the wheel a few degrees too far and end up in the ocean or don’t press the break and end up smashed to pieces against a trailer, decapitated, limbless, melted skin, or a pile of ash.

  
After a while, he just pulls off the highway. He stops the car but lets the engine run. He sits and he watches the headlights of other cars come and go.

  
He wishes his mom were here. She never followed her own advice, but the advice she used to give Logan wasn’t too bad. On his own the only thing he’s been able to grasp is the magnitude of it, not what to do or how to help or what to do with his guilt.

  
He realizes after a while that the headlights of the oncoming cars are blurred and that his eyes are wet. He wipes them with his fingertips, surprised.

  
Then he starts the car, turns around, and heads back to Neptune. He doesn’t exactly feel better; low in his stomach, he feels sick and empty at the same time. But he has managed to absorb the shock of it.

  
When Logan pulls through the security gates, it is past 2am and the main house is dark. Still, he doesn’t want to chance waking his father, so he heads to the pool house. He lies on the bed and watches the fan blades spin around, moving shadows around the room, humming hypnotically. He tries to picture Veronica, sleepless, staring at her ceiling, but he doesn’t know what her bedroom looks like now. He can only picture her old one in the house where she lived a year and a half ago, with pink walls and stuffed animals on the bed. It doesn’t fit, now. He already knew there was a point where their old Veronica ended and this new one began, that it wasn’t when Lilly died, but after. It all means something different now.

  
He types, “Are you asleep?” and presses send, though she still hasn’t answered any of his messages. She might be asleep now. He tries again. “I want to help,” he writes. When she doesn’t respond, he calls though he knows she isn’t going to answer. Somewhere in a bedroom he can’t picture, her phone rings and rings. He doesn’t leave a message because he can’t trust himself to say sorry the right way. _Sorry someone raped you. Sorry for buying GHB with my stupid friends in Tijuana. Sorry I used you as a human salt lick. Sorry for making everyone hate you. Sorry for leaving you alone._

  
Sorry doesn’t feel heavy enough to describe what he feels.

  
Logan closes his eyes. But, he can't remember what falling asleep feels like. The pool house is too warm. He kicks the sheets down until they are a humid, tangled mess at the foot of the bed. He sees Veronica’s face as she lay on the lounge chair under those ridiculous hanging lanterns. At the image, Logan’s heart punches against his rib cage, like a separate living thing. She could have just been asleep, she could have been a child caught in a nightmare, if not for the way her head would lull to the side and make her blink herself awake. Not with eyes like that: pupils dilated, unfocused, confused. Logan with the neck of a tequila bottle in his hand, seeing her like he would prey; like a snake, blending into her surroundings to catch her off guard. I want to go home, she might have said. He would have laughed, wouldn't he have? Did he? Just one more teenage girl with too much to drink, just one more mistake made in the company of enemies. He keeps seeing her face. He didn’t read it right: her smeared lipstick, eyes unable to focus, the damn white dress, hands (whose?) on her knee and her shoulders, the way her voice fell small and distant on his ears, when it stopped saying anything at all. The bed is cold and Logan pulls up the sheet, too high this time, too suffocating around his neck. He folds it so that it rests across his chest. He could have told them to leave her alone. He could have kept walking. His mind replays the scene over and over, as though reimagining it were enough to change it. But he can still see her face. He can’t stop seeing it. He forces himself to picture what must have come next. Logan can hear his own pulse, heart-attack fast. He kicks off the sheets again and switches the light on. He concentrates on breathing. He recites his locker combination as though it were a prayer. When that doesn’t work, he retrieves the key to the liquor cabinet and drinks scotch straight from the bottle, lets it burn its way down his throat, not too much, just enough so the images he can’t un-think blur together.

  
The sun is already rising when Logan falls asleep. When he finally dreams, it is of time machines and alternate universes.

 

 

 

 

  
“Hey, you’ve reached Logan. Today’s message for all you assholes, _Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do._ ― Voltaire.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have at least one more short in this series that I'm trying to figure out how to deal with. Wish me luck!


End file.
